Wildfire season has picked up throughout B.C.’s Southern Interior with more 14 fires sparked in the last 24 hours.
BC Wildfire information officer Aydan Coray said as of Monday afternoon there were 46 active wildfires in the Kamloops Fire Centre. Twenty-one of those occurred in the Vernon and Penticton fire zones, stretching from the north end of Shuswap Lake down to the U.S. border in Osoyoos.
The Mara Mountain wildfire is the most sizable of all the fires in the region. It’s located south of Sicamous and is an estimated 220 hectares in size.
“This fire is burning in quite challenging terrain that’s currently inaccessible to our ground resources,” Coray said.
Aerial resources are on standby monitoring the situation and a helicopter has been used in the afternoon to help reduce some of the fire activity. While smoke and fire activity is more than visible around the area, there’s no threat to any surrounding communities at this time, Coray said.
The situation in the days ahead remains a concern with lightning, without rain, sweeping in after a long stretch of extremely hot weather.
Over the last three days, the Kamloops Fire Region has seen around 90 lightning strikes, resulting in around 25 lightning-caused wildfires. Those numbers could rise in the next few days.
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“The temperatures are expected to decrease a little bit but unfortunately the system isn’t going to bring much in the way of measurable precipitation, which is always key at this time of year,” Coray said.
From the start of the season, there have been 153 wildfires in the Kamloops Fire Centre and around 22,000 hectares burned in total. This time last year the area had around 250 fire starts.
“So comparatively, we’re at about 100 fewer fire starts than we had last year, while the hectares burned are around the same totals, around 19,000 for last year,” Coray said.
“We are also closer to the 10-year average of 172 wildfires for this time of the year … and around 25,000 hectares burned.”